Researchers hypothesize the first human infected with HIV was a Bantu hunter who came into blood-to-blood contact with a chimpanzee with a similar virus in a jungle in Cameroon more than a century ago.

But the story doesn’t begin there. Ages before the inter-species transmission, “virus hunter” Nathan Wolfe says, an intracellular event created an ancestor of the virus that was passed down to us today.

Radiolab:

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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